Sam Raimi Gets Back to Basics with "Drag Me to Hell"

Phil Nugent — Fri, 01 May 2009 16:30:00 GMT

Sam Raimi earned the love and devotion of geeks everywhere with the Evil Dead pictures and the original comic book movie Darkman, then rolled up his sleeves and proved to the industry that he could suck it up and direct Kevin Costner (in the sensitive Crash-Davis-at-midlife picture For Love of the Game) if that's what it took to get them to trust him with Spider-Man. Three web-slinger movies later, Raimi has finally gotten in a position where he can make another horror flick, this time with a budget and a highly regarded young actress, Alison Lohman, in the Bruce Campbell part. James Rocchi stopped by the set of Drag Me to Hell to observe. "It's a long-standing piece of trivia," he writes, "that Raimi wears a suit to the set every day, in the mold of Alfred Hitchcock, so I made sure I put on an appropriate suit-and-tie combo for our visit. When Raimi came over to meet us, though, he was wearing a T-shirt and blazer, unshaven, relaxed and happy. Looking me up and down, he laughs: 'I see one member of the press dressed appropriately.'"

The script, which Raimi co-wrote with his brother Ted, who could cure cancer tomorrow and still remain best known to most of the world as Joxer the Mighty from Xena: Warrior Princess, casts Lohman as a loan officer at a bank who chooses to deny an old woman the loan she needs to keep from losing her home because Lohman is angling for a promotion and wants to impress her boss with her ruthlessness. It turns out that the old woman is a witch who retaliates by cursing Lohman with an evil spirit. It's torn from today's headlines, though it's not immediately clear who we're supposed to root for. Raimi says that "my brother and I wanted to write a story about a woman who, like in a lot of morality tales, has a choice to do good or evil, makes a sinful decision, and ends up paying the price for it -- or not, if she can escape."

Raimi also believes that Drag Me to Hell "is a little more complex in some ways than the Evil Dead movies, but the Evil Dead movies were suspense and scares and gross-outs and trying to be fun and funny. This is trying to do the same thing, but we're also trying to base how it kicks off in a way that's ... I don't want to say 'a little more real-world', because, at the time, believe it or not, I was trying to make the beginning of those movies 'real.' All I can say is this is a PG-13 picture, so it's a little less assaultive than the Evil Dead movies, which were unrated films." For those of us with fond memories of Bruce Campbell pulling a demon's dick off and the infamous sexual assault by forest in the first Evil Dead picture, that PG-13 business is ominous; the greatest suspense element connected to the movie may be waiting to see whether Raimi can still do this shit, or whether his acceptance by the industry will inhibit his grisly creativity. There may be signs of hope in the words of special effects chief Greg Nicotero, who recalls that Raimi brought him on board with a pep talk: "Listen, this is back to traditional stuff ... I want to use animatronics and puppets and dummy heads. None of that CG stuff. Get that crazy crap out of here!" Instead, Nicotero says, "We were designing rotted corpses and demon makeup and possession makeup," adding, "In this instance Sam wanted to stick with the traditional prosthetics, like puppets." No crazy stuff there, for sure.

When Good Directors Go Bad: For Love of the Game (1999, Sam Raimi)

Paul Clark — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 19:00:00 GMT

Since the beginning of his career, Sam Raimi has been a hero to genre lovers everywhere. It was his debut feature The Evil Dead that first brought Raimi to the attention of gorehounds, and his subsequent films further endeared him to his fans. With their outrageous camera movements, “splat-stick” comic violence, and the larger-than-life presence of Bruce Campbell, the Evil Dead trilogy gained Raimi a rabid cult following. However, he soon found himself confined in the horror genre. At first, he attempted to transfer his trademark style to other genres- crime story, comic book movie, Western- with varying degrees of success.

Finally, with 1998’s A Simple Plan, Raimi decided to keep his more gonzo impulses in check, and in doing so created his first “mature” work, and his most critically-acclaimed film to date. Having finally tasted mainstream acceptance, Raimi craved more, and decided to make a real stab at Hollywood respectability with his next project, an adaptation of Michael Shaara’s For Love of the Game. After all, what’s more mainstream than a baseball movie starring Kevin Costner? Unfortunately for Raimi, For Love of the Game turned out to be his worst- and not coincidentally, his least Raimi-esque- film to date.

For about half its running time, the film is a decent, fairly entertaining baseball movie. Its hero, Billy Chapel (played by Costner), is a veteran Detroit Tigers pitcher who suddenly finds himself throwing a perfect game in what may be the last start of his career. It’s been said that a perfect game is both the rarest and the most boring achievement in baseball, but Raimi keeps us involved by concentrating on Chapel- not only his actions and dialogue but also the thoughts that occur to him while he’s on the mound. It’s a neat touch whenever Chapel tunes out the hostile Yankee Stadium crowd with the mantra, “clear the mechanism.” By the time the game reaches its last few innings, we can more or less predict what the outcome will be, but Raimi has nonetheless done a pretty good job getting us to root for Chapel to finish the perfect game.

However, For Love of the Game isn’t content simply to be a baseball movie, and almost none of the scenes that take place off the baseball field are any good. Faring worst is the movie’s principal non-baseball storyline, which traces the trajectory of a relationship between Chapel and New York single mother Jane, played by Kelly Preston. Despite taking up nearly half the movie, the relationship between the two is ill-defined. As a result, there’s a highlight-reel to the storyline, amounting to little more than a series of flirtations, breakups, reconciliations, as well as a whole lot of grief from Jane.

A big part of the problem in these scenes is Preston’s performance. Preston, never a particularly good actress, is out of her element as a leading lady. Clearly overmatched and nervous opposite Costner (who’s pretty good here), she gives an overly fussy performance that seesaws constantly between the two notes she knows how to play- beaming and neurotic. Consequently, Jane comes off more as a pill than as the complicated, conflicted adult she’s meant to be.

It would be one thing if the film realized or even acknowledged what a prickly character Jane is, but instead it paints her as the foundation in Billy’s emotional life. Throughout his perfect game, Billy flashes back to his life with Jane- who just left him that morning- and it’s clear that we’re meant to care about whether these two lovers end up together in the end. Instead, all I wanted to do was to keep watching the game. After all, everyone falls in love sooner or later, but only seventeen major league pitchers have ever pitched a perfect game. Talk about burying the lead.

After For Love of the Game met with a critical drubbing and large-scale audience indifference, Raimi decided it was time to re-examine his career path again. First he rebounded with the flawed but interesting Southern Gothic thriller The Gift, after which he made his most popular films to date, the Spider-Man trilogy. With the Spider-Man films, Raimi finally found mainstream success without sacrificing any of his inimitable style, which helped all three of the Spidey films become the highest-grossing superhero movies ever made. And all of them- yes, even the third one- were better than For Love of the Game.

The Screengrab : for love of the game

Sam Raimi Gets Back to Basics with "Drag Me to Hell"

When Good Directors Go Bad: For Love of the Game (1999, Sam Raimi)